[In the following excerpt, Wood asserts that James's Devices and Desires "is a thriller and a detective novel."]

P. D. James's new novel[, Devices and Desires,] seems to return us straight to Auden's theology [as set out is his essay 'The Guilty Vicarage' in which he asserts that thrillers are more serious than detective fiction]. It is set in rural East Anglia, and takes its title from the Anglican prayer book: 'We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.' A psychopath called the Whistler is on the loose, killing young women. Then the haughty and handsome female administrator of a nuclear power station is murdered. Has the Whistler struck again, or has he found a disciple? Suspects include several scientists at the power station, a retired schoolmistress, a writer of cookery books, a protester against the use of nuclear energy, a secretary who has secretly joined an international terrorist organisation, and, marginally, Adam Dalgliesh, James's poet-detective, who has just inherited an old mill in the area, and is awkwardly close to several of these people. The book ends in a brilliant train of misdeductions and evasions, and an explicit contrast with the work of H. R. F. Keating, standing in perhaps for all detective fiction of the old school, where 'problems could be solved, evil overcome, justice vindicated, and death itself only a mystery which would be solved in the final chapter'. This book itself of course belongs to the old school, and does solve its central mystery at last: but it also signals with unusual clarity what the school is up to.

Dalgliesh, reflecting on his work, is also, necessarily, musing on the sort of fiction he is in: 'Perhaps this was part of the attraction of his job, that the process of detection dignified the individual death … mirroring in its excessive interest in clues and motives man's perennial fascination with the mystery of his mortality, providing, too, a comforting illusion of a moral universe in which innocence could be avenged, right vindicated, order restored. But nothing was restored, certainly not life, and the only justice vindicated was the uncertain justice of men.' 'Excessive interest' hints at the same reservation as Macdonald's image of Los Angeles; the rest of the passage confirms Auden's diagnosis, but denies his conclusion. An escape which so thoroughly knows it is an escape is a form of realism and asks to be judged like any other form of activity. James doesn't write quite as well as is often claimed—she is too keen on ripe old prose of the 'mystic-thicket-woven-from-thin-shafts-of-light' variety—and her characters cling a little too cosily to their stereotypes: but her ability to embed searching questions in a strong and complicated narrative is really impressive.

The novel emphatically argues, for instance, that death is not 'only a mystery'. An interesting conflict is remembered, in which a policeman calls a rotting female corpse a thing and is severely rebuked by Dalgliesh:

Sergeant, the word is 'body'. Or, if you prefer, there's 'cadaver', 'corpse', 'victim', even 'deceased' … What you are looking at was a woman. She was not a thing when she was alive and she is not a thing now.

This is just, but a little preacherly, and Dalgliesh has his own later encounter with what was a person and now feels like a thing. The question, I take it, is not a matter of words but of how we feel about endings, the abrupt crossing from life into death, the sudden absence of human identity. This is not an excuse for detection: it is what stalks detection itself, the story behind the stories, the reason, one might guess, for all the whimsical titles, those would-be jaunty whistlings in the dark: Bodies in a Bookshop, or Dead on the Level, or Death on the Rocks or Murder among Friends (all of these titles are mentioned by Binyon). Devices and Desires is a thriller and a detective novel.